A lot of us at the Courier & Press never did, either — until we had experiences of our own.

In honor of Halloween, here are five true, chilling tales we've experienced in, around and outside the Evansville area.

It sounded like a child

When I was in my mid-20s I worked at a newspaper in upstate New York along the Pennsylvania border.

This was exactly the kind of place that inspired Washington Irving to write the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with its terrifying headless horseman, a Hessian soldier forever looking for the head he lost in the Revolutionary War. In fact, there were a few graves of real Hessian soldiers scattered among the ancient cemeteries there.

The landscape was rugged hills and dark hollows. Small railroad towns and secluded farms dotted winding river valleys.

I arrived in early October and moved into a huge red brick carriage house that had been converted to a garage and apartments, tucked away behind a Victorian mansion on a maple-lined street. It was a young writer’s dream.

Until the creepiness began.

The first time something happened, a young couple upstairs invited me to watch football on TV. A windchime hanging in a corner came alive like it had been forcefully struck by an unseen hand. It was wintertime, and the windows were closed tight. I was startled, and so were my neighbors. Not long after that, the couple moved out. The upstairs apartment stayed empty the rest of my time there.

Then the scratching began. Every evening. Inside an interior wall.

It’s just bats, said the handyman. He might have been more convincing if he hadn’t been so creepy himself. He had a strange habit of showing up unannounced at random times and without tools.

About the time I convinced myself he was right, the scratching stopped, and something even more maddening began.

Sleigh bells began jingling. Where ever I was in the house, they jingled like they were with me in that room. I looked inside and outside but never found a source.

I began hearing footsteps running over my bedroom at night, along with the sound of a ball bouncing on the floor above. It sounded like a child.

I convinced the handyman to take me upstairs one afternoon to look around. All we found was a big empty space where a hayloft had been.

Some people would have been gone already. Since I was a poor, young reporter and really needed my security deposit back, I waited a few more months for my lease to end.

Then, like my neighbors, I left as fast as I could.

— Mark Wilson, Courier & Press reporter

The girl

It was the early 2000s. I was in seventh or eighth grade, staying the night at a friend’s house.

The two of us were on a conference call chatting with some boys from class and making Easy Mac – typical tween girl stuff.

I left the kitchen, rounded the corner to get something from her bedroom and froze. Someone was staring right at me. Maybe through me.

It was a young girl. But there were only two young girls in the house: me and my friend. And she was in the kitchen stirring the mac ‘n cheese.

So, let’s back up.

I’d heard stories about my friend’s house. Sometimes the wall of cabinets in her house would open and close. Sometimes they were left open. And the piano would play by itself. Maybe I dreamed that one, but I don’t think so.

Basically, I was already suspicious of paranormal activity in that place.

So, I see this young girl about our age near that wall of cabinets. She was looking around the corner, toward the kitchen, where we were laughing and carrying on.

Once I found my voice – which seemed to take years – I shrieked and ran back through the kitchen, startling my friend and the boys on the phone.

I’m pretty sure no one believed me. We went back to look for her, and she was gone.

But I saw her, in cliché Hollywood fashion, with long dark hair wearing a long nightgown.

Now before you go pointing fingers at me – no, it’s not the girl from “The Ring.” This happened just before that movie was released. Plus, it’s been well over seven days, and I’m still kickin’.

Maybe I made it all up in my head. But that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

— Megan Erbacher, Courier & Press reporter

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A ball and chain languishes in the sun at the Crenshaw House, an old slaves' residence, in Southern Illinois.(Photo: Mike Lawrence / Evansville Courier & Press)

The slave house

Years ago, I was doing a story with the legendary Gleaner writer Judy Jenkins at the Old Slave House in Southern Illinois. I remember it being a clear winter day when we visited the landmark, which was open to the public at the time.

The owner gave us the obligatory tour of the house. The tour ended on the third floor, where the cells the slaves were kept in are. Believe me: if any place could be haunted, it is that place.

As the tour ended, Judy and the proprietor, who told us we were the only other people in the house, returned to the first floor to do the interview. I told our guide I would like to stay awhile on the third floor to take some photos.

I was taking some detail pictures of a pretty spooky looking ball and chain, about four feet from the stairs leading down. With my back to the stairs, I distinctly heard the sound of a child’s wooden ball rolling down the steps.

Within a second or two, I turned around and took a step toward the stairs and looked down.

Nothing. No ball or anything. I walked down the steps to the bottom. Still no ball.

But I know what I heard. The whole thing sent a chill up my spine, knowing that children were probably kept in some of those cells.

— Mike Lawrence, Courier & Press photographer

Florence the pyromaniac

I’ve heard fists pounding on my bedroom door, only to open up and find no one there.

When I was crashing on my dad’s couch one summer, he woke in the middle of the night and saw a translucent woman hovering above my sleeping body. Then there was that weird entity in my college apartment that took milk jugs out of the trash can and tossed them across the room.

But for some reason, I still didn’t believe in ghosts. Until I met Florence.

The graveyard at St. Luke Baptist Church has been adopted by the Krewe of Centaur as a community project.(Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

That’s what my future wife and her sister called the thing that lived with them on West Side. It would flush the toilet at random times, send alarm clocks blaring at 3 a.m. and stomp around the bedrooms of their townhouse apartment when no one else was upstairs.

I never witnessed any of that, though. So, being a fun-hating dipwad, I teased them for being paranoid.

Then the fire happened.

We were unloading an obscene haul from Sam’s Club one day. We’d bought a package of toothbrushes and set them atop the gas stove.

Now: in order for this story to land its punch, you have to know a thing or two about the stove. It was old, and you really had to push on the stove knobs to ignite the gas. It was like opening a child-proof pill bottle. They weren’t something you could just bump and engage.

We were stacking the last of the groceries into the refrigerator – on the other side of the kitchen – when we smelled something strange: burning plastic.

We turned and saw a fire blooming around one of the burners. The poor toothbrushes were engulfed.

Panicked, we extinguished the blaze. My wife looked around the kitchen, wide-eyed.

Not cool, Florence, she said.

After that, a weird tension filled the kitchen. One night I got up to get a glass of water, and when I walked downstairs it felt like the kitchen was encased in a bubble of dread.

The old house

This story was told to me by the town gossip in a small Spencer County river town on the Ohio River.

I hesitate to get too specific with places and names to protect the family in the story. It was an interesting tale, not to mention, hard to believe.

I'm a bit of a skeptic. What can I say? I'm a journalist.

The story was so compelling, I had to find the woman who had experienced the haunting. It took a few months to locate her in her new apartment, but I succeeded and she was willing to recount her experience.

This is the story as best I can recollect.

It must have been around 2001. A warmer than usual fall. A woman and her two young children, a boy, 8, and girl, 5, were close to being homeless after a marital split. Without the funds to travel to another state to live with family, the trio was stuck.

They had a beater truck, but no money for gas. When the mom had resigned herself to sleeping in the cab of their truck, an old friend came to the rescue and offered them a place to stay.

It was a property the friend had just bought for a great price. It needed some fixing up but, if the mom was willing to do the work, they would let the family stay there for free.

That very same day, they pulled into the driveway of the home. It looked like it must have been built in the 1850s or before. A wrought iron fence surrounded the home that stood on a corner of the town's main street. The grass, yellowed and dry, stood about knee-high. One of the windows on the second floor was shattered. The back door was hanging by one hinge.

The family didn't care. They had a place to stay.

They unloaded the truck and moved everything into the kitchen of the home. It was the only room with a fan and the stagnant air was heavy.

Mac-and-cheese was prepared on the gas stove while the kids colored in their coloring books. Mom rolled out the sleeping bags, but the kids didn't climb in. It was too hot. Instead, they just laid down on the bags and tried to sleep.

Tried, but didn't succeed.

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Creepy doll(Photo: Jon Webb / Courier & Press)

That's when they heard the talking. Children's voices. The woman thought it must be neighbor children and went outside to check – her own two children clinging to her waist.

It was already past 9 p.m. and dark. Nobody was outside that she could see or hear. Back inside they went.

As the kids began to settle down, the giggling began. Three or four children were clearly giggling. And it sounded like it was coming from upstairs.

Armed with a flashlight and a rolling pin, the mom left her children, now clutching each other on the same sleeping bag.

The home had polished wooden floors that creaked with each step. The stairs rose up through the center of the house with heavy wooden banisters ending in opposite-facing curves.

She called to the children to come out and to stop trying to scare them. The giggling grew louder. Constant. She tried again to call them out. Her voice booming in the big, empty house.

The giggling stopped. Silence. A long, long silence.

And then the whispering began. She couldn't make out what they were saying, but the voices were real. To her anyway.

And her kids could hear them, too. They hissed for her to come back between quiet sobs. They were too afraid to cry out loud.

She was already halfway up the stairs when the whispering stopped, and the temperature began to drop. The air now felt chill as a late-November night.

When the temperature fell, so did her courage. She spun around and ran down the stairs. Her children were already heading toward the door as she caught up to them. They climbed into their pickup and headed to the local convenience store and stayed the night in the parking lot under the well-lit fluorescent lights.

The next day, when her friend went to check on her, the mom and the kids were still outside the store. They recounted their story. The friend, while concerned, wasn't too surprised. It wasn't the first time children's voices were heard in the empty home. And it wouldn't be the last.

The home still stands vacant 17 years later. The young family moved to a new town downriver. Mom still talks about it. The boy and his sister refuse.

I drive by there from time-to-time keeping my eyes on the upstairs window ... still broken.